1) Consistency - The stability in person's
behaviour over time and across situations
2) Distinctiveness - The behavioural differences
among people reacting to the same situation
Personality refers to an individual's unique
constellation of consistent behavioural traits
Personality Traits
A durable disposition to behave in a particular
way in a variety of situations
Factor Analysis: Correlations
among many variables are
analyzed to identify closely
related clusters of variables
Five Factor Model
Robert McCrae and Paul Costa used factor
analysis to arrive at the five-factor model of
personality
"Big Five"
1) Extraversion (positive emotionality):
Sociable, fun-loving, and affectionate
2) Neuroticism (negative emotionality):
Worried, Insecure and Self-pitying
3) Openess to Experience: Imaginative,
Preference for variety and Independent
4) Agreeableness: Soft-hearted,
Trusting and helpful
5) Conscientiousness (constraint): Well
organized, Careful and self-disciplined
Psychodynamic Perspectives
Freud's Psychoanalytical Theory
Attempts to explain personality, motivation and
psychological disorders by focusing on the influence of
early childhood experiences and unconscious motives
and conflicts and on methods people use to cope with
their sexual and aggressive urges
Structure of Personality Divided into 3 Components
1) id: The primitive, instinctive
component that operates according
to the pleasure principle
2) Ego: The decision making
component that operates
according to the reality principle
3) Superego: Moral component that
incorporates social standards about
what represents rights and wrongs
Levels of Awareness
Conscious: Consists of
whatever one is aware of @ a
particular point in time
Preconscious: Contains
material just beneath the
surface of awareness that can
easily be retrieved
Unconscious: Contains thoughts, memories and
desires that are well below the surface of
conscious awareness but nonetheless exert
great influence on our behaviour
Anxiety and Defence Mechanisms
Conflicts played out in unconscious can produce anxiety
Effort to ward off anxiety involves defence mechanisms which
are largely unconscious reactions that protect a person from
unpleasant emotions such as anxiety and guilt
Rationalization:
Creating false but
plausible excuses to
justify unacceptable
behaviour
Repression: Keeping
distressing thoughts and
feelings buried in the
unconscious
Self-Deception
Projection: Attributing one's
own thoughts, feelings or
motives to another
Displacement: Diverting
Emotional feelings from their
original source to a substitute
target
Reaction Formation:
Behaving in a way
that's exactly opposite
of one's true feelings
Regression: a
reversion to immature
patterns of behaviour
Identification: Bolstering
Self-Esteem by forming an
imaginary or real alliance with
some person or group
Sublimation: Occurs when unconscious,
unacceptable Impulses are channelled
into socially acceptable, perhaps even
admirable behaviours
Development: Psychosocial Stages
Developmental Periods with a
characteristic sexual focus that leave
their mark on adult personality
Fixation: a failure
to move forward
from one stage to
another as
expected
5 Stages
1) Oral Stage - First year of life, fixation in this
stage could form the basis for obsessive
eating or smoking later in life
2) Anal Stage - Second Year, could lead to
association between genital concerns and
anxiety as well as anxiety about sexual activities
later in life
3) Phallic Stage - Age 4 - Oedipal Complex (Children manifest erotically tinged desires
for their opposite sex parent), failure to resolve this complex could result in continued
hostility and prevention of identifying adequately with that parent
4 & 5) Latency and Genital Stages - 6 years to puberty, Events center of
expanding social contacts beyond the immediate family. Sexual urges
reappear and are directed towards peers
Jung's Analytical Psychology
Proposed Unconscious consists of 2 layers
1) Personal Unconscious: houses material that is not within one's
conscious awareness because it has been repressed or forgotten
2) Collective Unconscious: a storehouse of
latent memory traces inherited from people's
ancestral past
Archetypes: emotionally charged
images and thought forms that have
universal meaning
First to describe introverts
and extraverts
Adler's Individual Psychology
Striving for Superiority: a Universal drive to
adapt, improve oneself, and master life's
challenges
Compensation: Involves efforts to overcome
imagined or real inferiorities by developing
ones abilities
Inferiority Complex:
Exaggerated feelings of
weakness and
inadequacy
He was the first to focus on birth order affecting personality
Evaluating Psychodynamic Perspectives
Criticized:
1) Poor testability
2) Inadequate Evidence
3) Sexism
4) Unrepresented Samples
Research Demonstrated that:
1) Unconscious forces can influence behaviour
2) Internal conflict often plays
a key role in generating
psychosocial distress
3) Early childhood experiences can have powerful
influences on adult personality
4) People do use defence
mechanisms to reduce their
experience of unpleasant emotions
Include all of the diverse theories
descended from the work of
Sigmund Freud, which focus on
unconscious mental forces
Behavioural Perspectives
Skinners Ideas
Personality Structure
Skinner argued that behaviour is
fully determined by environmental
stimuli
Free will is an illusion
Personality Development as a
Product of Conditioning
Believed most human responses are
shaped by the type of conditioning that he
describes operant conditioning
Enviro consequences - Reinforcement,
punishment and extinction - determine
people's patterns of responding
Views personality
development as a
continuous, lifelong
journey
Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory
Maintains people are self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting
and self-regulating. And aren't just reactive organisms shaped
and shepherded by external events
Emphasized
important role of
forward-directed
planning
Reciprocal Determinism: The idea that
internal mental events, external
environmental events and overt
behaviour all influence one another
Observational Learning: Occurs when an organism's
responding is influenced by the observation of
others, who are called models
Self-sufficiency: Refers to
one's beliefs about one's
ability to perform
behaviours that should lead
to expected outcomes
Perceptions of self-efficiency can influence
which challenges people tackle and how well
they can perform
Mischel and the
Person-Situation
Controversy
He focused his attention on
the extent to which situational
factors govern behaviour
People make
responses that they
think will lead to
reinforcement in the
situation at hand
Both the person
and situation are
important
determinants of
behaviour
Evaluating Behavioural Approaches
Criticism
1) Dehumanizing
nature of radical
behaviourism
2) Dilution of the
behavioural approach
Behaviourism: A Theoretical
orientation based on the
premise that scientific
psychology should study only
observable behaviour
Humanistic Perspectives
Rogers's Person-Centered Theory
The Self
Self-Concept: A collection of beliefs about one's own
nature, unique qualities and typical behaviour
Incongruence: The
degree of disparity
between one's self
concept and one's
actual experience
Development of the Self
Rogers believes people have a strong need for affection, love and
acceptance and that unconditional love from parents fosters
congruence and the conditional love fosters incongruence
Anxiety and Defence
Experiences that threated people's personal views of
themselves are the principle cause of anxiety
People with high
incongruent self
concepts are likely
to be plagued with
anxiety
Maslow's Theory of Self Actualization
The Healthy Personality
Self Actualizing Persons: People with
exceptionally healthy personalities,
marked by continued personal growth
Hierarchy of Needs
Human motives organized into a pyramid of needs: A
systematic arrangement of needs, according to priority,
in which basic needs must be met before less basic
needs are aroused
Need for self-actualization: The need to fulfill
one's potential; it is the highest need in Maslow's
motivational hierarchy
"What a man can be, he must be"
Evaluating Humanistic Perspectives
Weaknesses
1) Poor testability
2) Unrealistic View of human nature
3) Inadequate Evidence
Biological Perspectives
Eysenck's Theory
Views personality
structure as a hierarchy
of traits derived from 3
higher-order traits
Extraversion
Neuroticism
Psychoticism
"Personality is determined to a large extent by a person's genes"
Genetics
Twin study results supported hypothesis
that genetic blueprints shape the contours
of personality
Neuroscience of Personality
Relationships between specific
personality traits and aspects
of brain structure and function
MRI to look at big 5 and size of specific areas of the brain
New line of research
Evolutionary Approach
Assert that personality has a biological basis
because natural selection has favoured certain
traits over the course of human history
Evaluating Biological Perspectives
Weaknesses
1) obsession with establishing the exact
magnitude of heritability coefficients
2) Effects of nature and nurture are twisted
together in complicated interactions
Culture and Personality
Individualism Vs. Collectivism
Individualism: Involves putting personal
goals ahead of a group goals and defining
one's identity in terms of personal attributes
rather than group memberships
Collectivism: Involves putting group goals ahead of
personal goals and defining one's identity in terms of
the group one belongs to
National Character: The
idea that various cultures
have widely recognized
prototype personalities
Self Enhancement: Involves focusing on positive feedback from others,
exaggerating one's strengths, and seeing oneself as above average
Contemporary Empirical Approaches
Renewed Interest in Narcissism
Narcissism: A personality trait marked by an inflated sense of
importance, a need for attention and admiration, and a sense
of entitlement, and a tendency to exploit others
Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)
1) Grandiose sense of importance
2) Constant need for attention
3) Difficulty Dealing with Criticism
4) Sense of Entitlement
Found in 3-5% of people
Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) is the
most widely used measure of narcissism
Scores have been rising from 15.5 in
the 80's to almost 17.5 in mid 2000's
Perfectionism
Hewitt and Flett differentiate between 3 different
types of perfectionism and developed the
Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (MPS)
1) Self-Oriented Perfectionism: A personal orientation in which
a person sets high standards for one's self
Can lead to intense
self-scrutiny, criticism
and dysfunctional
emotions when
standards aren't
meant
2) Other-Oriented Perfectionism: The tendency to set
high standards for others in your social environment
Failure to meet standards lead
to criticism and dissatisfaction
with others and anger toward
them
3) Other-Prescribed Perfectionism: A belief that
others are imposing unrealistic standards on you